The Scoundrel and the Scientist

by Pamela Hodgson

(This article originally appeared in Chicago
History, the magazine of the Chicago Historical Society, in the Fall-Winter
1990-1991 issue. Check out the magazine for some fascinating illustrations.
I've added some explanatory material and asides in the form of hyperlinks;
the article itself remains as it originally appeared. This article and the
associated linked material are copyright 1990, 1998 by Pamela Hodgson. All
rights reserved.)

Within days of opening its doors in 1892, the University of Chicago began
planning an observatory to house the world's largest refracting
telescope and an array of scientific instruments that would rival any
in the world. The university dedicated the Yerkes Observatory in Williams
Bay, Wisconsin, five years later in October of 1897. The man behind the
new telescope was George Ellery Hale, the first member of the University
of Chicago's astrophysics faculty. His founding of the Yerkes Observatory
revolutionized astronomy in America and brought the nation, which until
then lagged behind Europe, to the forefront of astrophysics.

In 1860 a new instrument, the spectroscope, transformed the field of
astronomy, ushering in the new science of astrophysics. Astrophysics "seeks
to ascertain the nature of the heavenly bodies, rather than their positions
or motions in space," James Keeler, director of the Allegheny Observatory,
wrote of the new science. It seeks to determine, "what they
are, rather than where they are." The spectroscope uses a system
of prisms to separate sunlight or starlight into its component spectral
lines. A similar system had already been used in the laboratory to observe
the spectra produced by burning various substances. Scientists reasonsed
that by comparing these laboratory spectra with solar spectra, the chemical
composition of the sun could be determined. As late as 1860, the nature
of the sun was still a mystery. In the 1820s, well-known astronomers suggested
that the sun was a planet like our own, complete with inhabitants whom we
could not see because of solar cloud cover.

George Hale was born in 1868 in Hyde
Park, the son of William Ellery Hale, who made his fortune manufacturing
hydraulic elevators. The young Hale pursued a broad range of interests,
everything from music and literature to chemistry and physics. He became
interested in astronomy and built his own telescope at age fourteen. Impressed
with his son's enthusiasm, William bought George a small (though excellent)
telescope made by the Clarks of Massachusetts, the country's preeminent
lensmakers.

George read avidly of the spectroscopic work of solar astronomers J. Norman Lockyer of England, Jules-Cesar Janssen
of France, Charles Augustus Young of the United States, and others and became
determined to photograph a spectrum. He succeeded in 1884, when he was just
sixteen. Two years later, in 1886, he entered the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) as a physics major. Accustomed to working on his own
research, he was bored with his courses, and he volunteered as an assistant
at the Harvard College Observatory, under the supervision of E.C. Pickering.
Each summer he came home to Chicago and continued his observational work.
His special interest was solar prominences, the jets of material spiking
out from the sun's surface. In 1888, halfway through his college education,
his father built him a spectroscopic laboratory, fully equipped for comparing
solar spectra with laboratory spectra.

Just before his senior year at MIT, Hale came up with an idea while riding
a Chicago trolley car. He envisioned the spectroheliograph, an instrument
that would permit him to photograph the solar prominences in full daylight,
without benefit of an eclipse to block out the sun's light. He took the
idea back to the Harvard Observatory, where he proved its feasibility and
incorporated the results into his thesis. The spectroheliograph consisted
of a spectroscopic camera combined with a telescope. Hale fitted a photographic
plate across the eyepiece of a telescope with a clockwork device to move
the apparatus at the same pace that the sun crosses the sky. By focusing
his spectroscope on the part of the spectrum that is most distinct in solar
prominences, Hale's photographic plate would collect a spectral image of
this solar phenomenon. By age twenty-one, Hale had earned an international
reputation.

In the meantime, Hale's father had agreed to fund a new telescope for
the observatory in the family's backyard at 4545 South Drexel Boulevard.
This was no amateur telescope. It was to have a twelve-inch objective lens
crafted by John Brashear (a friend of Hale's from Pittsburgh who hoped to
build the world's largest telescope) and a mounting made by Warner and Swasey.
Hale filed papers to incorporate the new telescope and spectroscopic lab
as the Kenwood Observatory and held a dedication. More than one hundred
people, including several well-known American astronomers, attended, and
the event was reported in several scientific journals. With his own observatory
to continue his research, Hale decided to postpone graduate school.

The Kenwood Observatory and its proprietor had not escaped the notice
of William Rainey Harper, president of the new University
of Chicago, who sought bright scholars to build a first-rate faculty.
In May of 1890, Harper formally offered Hale a faculty position. Hale might
have accepted the position immediately had the terms been more attractive.
In addition to wanting Hale on the faculty, Harper expected the Kenwood
Observatory to be annexed to the university, and he suggested that Hale's
father might fund two faculty positions as well. He proposed that the observatory
be renamed after the Hales in return. Miffed, George Hale wrote to Harper:
"If I am not competent to obtain a place on my own merits at present,
it will probably be best for me to wait until I shall have gained experience
by future study."

New terms were negotiated two years later. Hale was excited to learn
that Albert Michelson, the physicist whose work on the nature of light would
later earn him a Nobel Prize, had joined the university. Michelson had urged
Harper to do everything possible to recruit Hale. On July 1, 1892, Hale
agreed to join the University of Chicago as an associate professor of "astral
physics," as his appointment misstated. His father agreed that after
the new professor's first year, if George chose to remain with the university,
he would donate the movable apparatus of the Kenwood Observatory, valued
at $25,000, provided the university raise another $225,000 in the ensuing
year to build an observatory. Hale revealed his true motive in accepting
the faculty position in a letter to a colleague later that July: "I
would not consider the thing for a moment were it not for the prospect
of some day getting the use of a big telescope to carry out some of my pet
schemes." The opportunity came before the summer was out.

Hale spoke in August to the American Association for the Advancement
of Science about the Kenwood spectroheliograph. After his talk, Alvan G.
Clark, maker of the lens for Hale's four-inch telescope, described two forty-two-inch
lens blanks he had in his shop. The University of Southern California had
intended to build a telescope on Mount Wilson, near Pasadena, to surpass
the Lick Observatory's thirty-six-inch aperture telescope. They had ordered
the two glass blanks for the objective lens, planning to pay for them through
the sale of some land given to the university. The objective lens is the
key component of a telescope; it magnifies stars and stellar bodies. The
lens blanks--the circles of glass shaped and joined to form the lens--were
ground to a precise curvature and polished smooth. At a scale of forty-two
inches, minor imperfections will show up as major flaws when the lens is
in use. Because of their size, the blanks had been made with great difficulty
by Mantois in Paris; he shipped them to the Clark shop in Cambridgeport,
Massachusetts. Meanwhile, the bottom dropped out of the land boom in California,
and the land that was to fund the telescope became worthless. Mantois was
owed sixteen thousand dollars, and Clark had two blanks and no telescope.

Hale wanted the blanks for his proposed observatory. He estimated the
cost of the lenses, mounting, and an observatory structure at about $300,000.
On his father's advice, he sought the support of many Chicago industrialists
but had no success. One of the industrialists recommended that he see Charles
T. Yerkes. Yerkes, builder of the Chicago public transportation system,
was well established in Chicago by this time, having arrived some years
earlier. Despite his success, his coarse personality and his suspicious
business deals kept him from being fully accepted into Chicago society.
Hale knew Yerkes's reputation and possibly had met him through his father.
Harper had already attempted to persuade Yerkes to fund a biology building
for the new university, but he did not convince Yerkes. Harper told Hale
to write to Yerkes; in a letter Hale described his plan to create "the
largest telescope and the largest and best equipped observatory in the world."

The forty-two-inch blanks would make a telescope with a forty-inch aperture,
allowing two inches for the housing, Hale explained. This telescope would
be four inches larger in diameter than the Lick telescope, which meant a
25% increase in the instrument's light-gathering capacity. Theoretically,
it would magnify objects to 4,000 times their size (though in practice atmospheric
effects make magnification greater than 1,000 times impractical, as Hale
knew). The light-gathering power would be 35,000 times that of a human eye,
and detailed features of the moon and stars would be discernible for the
first time.

Hale appealed to Yerkes's vanity. "And the donor could have no more
enduring monument," he wrote. "It is certain that Mr. Lick's name
would not have been nearly so widely known today were it not for the famous
observatory established as a result of his munificence." That was all
it took. At a meeting on October 2, 1892, with Hale and Harper, Yerkes agreed
to fund the observatory, on the condition that they guarantee it would be
the largest in the world.

In the University of Chicago Weekly of October 22, 1892, Hale
crowed that "no definite limit has as yet been assigned to the expenditure
contemplated, but the generosity of the donor is fully expressed by his
desire that the completed observatory shall be second to none." Their
exact agreement was outlined in a letter from Yerkes to Harper, dated December
5, 1892:

It is with much satisfaction I learned from you that a lens for a large
telescope could be purchased immediately, and I informed you I would purchase
the lense and have it finished; that I would also pay for the frame and
mountings of the telescope, so that the two together would make a perfect
telescope to be the largest in the world . . . . Since then I have felt
it proper that the telescope should have a home, to be paid for by me;
and I have concluded to add to my gift an observatory necessary to contain
the instrument.

Immediately after the October meeting, Harper contacted the president
of the University of Southern California, which still held the option on
the lens blanks. The Californians did not answer, as they were busy hunting
for another donor. They had suggested to Clark that he might begin work
shortly on the lens for Mount Wilson. After several weeks of waiting, Hale
and Harper wired the university to withdraw their offer for the blanks.
Abruptly their offer of purchase was accepted.

While Clark went to work on grinding the lens blanks, Hale designed the
mounting and the instrumentation. The mounting was to be constructed by
Warner & Swasey of Cleveland, who had made the Kenwood Observatory's
twelve-inch telescope; the other instruments would be built by John Brashear.
The building would be designed by the University of Chicago's architect,
Henry Ives Cobb.

A prime consideration was location. Virtually all major university observatories
were on or adjacent to their campuses. Harvard had a small observatory in
the country of Peru, but their main observatory was in Cambridge. The only
exception was the Lick Observatory, whose Mount Hamilton location was miles
from the University of California campus; Lick, however, was begun before
its affiliation with the university. Despite the success of the Kenwood
Observatory, Hale considered Hyde Park completely unsuitable for his new
observatory because of urban pollution and artificial light, both of which
would impede the telescope's view.

Word of the project had leaked out days after the Yerkes meeting. Numerous
donors offered land for the observatory site. Locations included the Pasadena
site originally intended for the University of Southern California telescope,
Morgan Park (then still a suburb of
Chicago), Highland Park, Elgin, Rockford, Peoria, Kankakee, Dixon, and a
spot on the shores of Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. To evaluate the sites, Hale
polled leading astronomers across the nation for their views on the ideal
location for an observatory, making no mention to them of the specific sites
that had been offered.

For the project, Hale envisioned interaction between the observatory
staff and the leaders and scholars in physics and chemistry, as well as
collaboration in their laboratories, where physical and chemical experiments
would complement the work of the observatory. This interdisciplinary approach
had become common in England, where Norman Lockyer had collaborated with
chemist Edward Frankland in his lab to identify the spectral lines he observed
in the sun. Lockyer's work led to the discovery of helium.
Hale intended to emulate the European methods, and he concluded that the
observatory could be no more than one hundred miles from the university.

Urban areas in general, or anywhere cities might expand, were out of
the question. Hale also ruled out locations near factories or locations
where manufacturing was likely to develop. Smoke from the factories or chimney
smoke from homes might obscure the telescope's view, and electric lights
could also be a problem. Another major consideration was vibration. The
fine resolving power of the telescope would be wasted if passing trains
shook the telescope. Still, proximity to a railroad was essential for access
to the university. Several respondents to Hale's questions pointed out that
to prevent vibrations, the observatory's distance from the railroad would
depend on how effectively the ground transmitted the vibration. If the subsoil
was sand or gravel, the distance need only be half a mile.

Several of the proposed locations were on the shores of Lake Michigan.
The advantage of a lakefront location was an unobstructed horizon, but cloudiness
and humidity could hamper the observatory's work. Hale learned from Professor
Mark Harrington, chief of the weather bureau, that the average annual cloudiness
at three lakefront locations ranged from 51 to 58%. An unnamed point forty-seven
miles from the lake averaged only 47%. Based on Harrington's data, Hale
and the trustees rejected the lakefront site.

A group of university trustees visited the remaining sites with Hale's
comments in hand. The final decision was made in late 1893 in Hale's absence,
though he remained in constant contact with Harper throughout the process.
The site chosen was fifty-five acres of land on the shores of Lake Geneva
in Wisconsin. Away from Lake Michigan's cloudiness, with little appeal for
industry, and with a Chicago and North Western Railroad line terminating
just over a mile away in Williams Bay, it matched the project's specifications.
Businessman John Johnson, Jr., donated the land, valued at $50,000. With
the site chosen, Cobb could complete the architectural plans.

Hale submitted the specifications for the project to Charles Yerkes.
The total cost was $285,375, just under his original estimate of $300,000.
Yerkes exploded in rage. It seemed the generosity of the donor did indeed
have limits. Hardly the scientific sophisticate, he envisioned no more than
a huge telescope inside a big building with his name on it. He saw no need
for spectroscopes and refractometers, and he accused Hale of exploiting
his generosity.

Hale's plan was for an astrophysical observatory rather than an astronomical
observatory, a distinction Yerkes would never understand. France and Germany
had observatories equipped for studying the physics of celestial bodies,
and the national observatories of England and Russia were equipped for some
astrophysical work. North America had no such facilities. The major astronomical
observatories, Lick and Harvard, had little of the spectroscopic and related
laboratory equipment necessary. The nation's best spectroscopic lab, located
at Johns Hopkins University, had no observatory. What Hale intended to build
was unique in the United States, and it would bring astrophysical research
in this country into line with that of Europe.

To accomplish his ambitious plan, Hale included a large spectroscope
and spectroheliograph for the forty-inch telescope, two smaller telescopes
(one the former Kenwood instrument, as his father had agreed) and accompanying
instruments, the best micrometers available for detailed measurements of
the position and size of the planets and stars, and a fully equipped spectroscopic
laboratory. The plan for the building incorporated ideas gathered from visits
to major observatories in the United States and in Europe, especially the
Astrophysical Observatory at Potsdam in Germany, which Hale knew well.

No doubt Yerkes's reluctance to foot the bill had something to do with
the losses he suffered in the depression and stock market panic of 1893.
He told Hale to use Rockefeller's millions for the observatory, but Rockefeller's
millions were busy funding lecture halls and dormitories at the University
of Chicago, as Harper tried to explain to him. Harper reported that it took
two hours to calm Yerkes down. The instrument maker Brashear also visited
Yerkes to explain the instruments he was building. Brashear told Hale afterward
that "if you or some good spectroscopist like you does not have something
to do with this work, I confess I have no heart to make it for such a man
as Yerkes, because he has absolutely no interest in its scientific value."
Hale approached other donors to fund the laboratory, but while still unwilling
to give more money, Yerkes was adamant that no one else's name should be
on any part of the observatory.

Work on the mounting for the telescope, an expense Yerkes did not question,
as already well under way. It was finished in time to dominate the Manufactures
Building at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.
The sixty-two-foot tube and its supporting structure, the first ever to
use an electric motor to move it, weighed almost twenty tons. As a complement
to the exposition, Hale organized an international meeting of astronomers
in Chicago. His intent was to concentrate on the "new astronomy,"
or astrophysics. Scientists were drawn from all over the world by the topic
as well as by the chance to see the mounting for the telescope, famous well
before its completion. Hale's plans were nearly ruined when fire ravaged
the Manufactures Building. Harper wrote to Hale that horses and men dragged
the giant tube clear of the flames. Hours later, careful inspection revealed
the telescope to be unscathed.

When the fire occurred, Hale had been in Europe doing graduate work with
physicists Max Planck and Hermann von Helmholtz in their laboratories and
at the Astrophysical Observatory at Potsdam, the model for many of his plans.
At Potsdam, he worked with H.C. Vogel and J.C. Scheiner, who had just pioneered
the use of dry photographic plates for photographing spectra. These photographs
were the first accurate enough to measure Doppler shifts (Doppler shifts
are apparent changes in wavelengths of light as the result of a moving light
source) and, therefore, the speeds at which stars move away from Earth.

Cobb, the university's architect, sent Hale his drawings for the observatory
building. Included were spectroscopic labs, photographic labs and darkrooms,
and instrument and optical shops. Precision instruments were mounted on
piers anchored in concrete, so as not to be affected by vibrations in the
building. The main dome, with a moveable floor that
would rise to meet the eyepiece of the telescope, and the two smaller domes
with electrically operated shutters, formed a Latin cross. Cobb noted that
Yerkes bought the first Rodin sculpture to come to America, and he hoped
his Romanesque exterior and elegant interior designs
would impress the millionaire where the instruments had not.

Hale disliked being so far from the action and returned to Chicago without
completing his Ph.D. Instead, he oversaw the construction of the building
and the testing of the lens in Cambridgeport in October of 1895. The lens
was as magnificent as had been promised. He wrote to Yerkes, trying again
to instill in him his own awe and to open the donor's pocketbook. Yerkes
said he would consider the matter.

Charles Yerkes's reluctance notwithstanding, the project moved forward.
By autumn of 1896 the building was sufficiently complete for Hale and some
of his staff--including the newly recruited astronomer E.E. Barnard, who
would stay at the Yerkes Observatory for the remainder of his career--to
move into their offices. By the end of the year, the Kenwood dome and its
twelve-inch telescope were in place.

While Hale and Harper were building the Yerkes Observatory, Yerkes was
building a million-dollar mansion for himself in New York. Harper wrote
to Yerkes in spring of 1897, just before the lens was to be delivered. Yerkes
shot back:

On the same date I received your letter I also read of a meeting of
the Civic Federation, at which you were present. It was a notable gathering
of the great and good few who represent the great and good part of our
city, and I see by the names that these people are the ones who uphold
all the charities of our city, who are always fairly throwing away their
wealth so that others may be benefitted thereby, who are building up the
great institutions of the city in a most daring and reckless manner, while
such people as myself, according to the theory of your friends, are doing
their best to pull to pieces and destroy what little honor and integrity
is left in your community.

No check was enclosed.

Hale wrote to Yerkes a month later when the new lens arrived. Special
trains were chartered for the journey from Cambridgeport to Williams Bay.
Alvan G. Clark accompanied the lense despite his failing health (he died
within weeks of the installation) and supervised the installation. Barnard
tested the instrument, and he discovered a new star almost immediately.
Hale wrote to Yerkes to report this. Yerkes wrote back, ordering that no
one but those supervising the installation and testing be allowed near the
telescope. The Manufactures Building fire and the near tragedy had made
its impression on the patron.

Despite all efforts to protect the instrument, disaster struck at 6:43
a.m. on May 29. A cable snapped, and the movable floor crashed to the ground.
No one was in the building when it happened. Hale and his staff raced to
the scene. Looking through the telescope to see if it was damaged, they
found that a network of fine lines crossed the aperture. A workman sent
to inspect the delicate instrument found that the lines were made by a spider
web in the tube. The lens was unharmed. Nonetheless the damage to the floor
was a major setback. The rising floor and movable dome were out of commission
until September. Hale used the time to plan the dedication of the observatory
for the fall. Four days of scientific meetings were planned, culminating
in the dedication ceremony. The visitors then would board chartered trains
to Chicago for additional events to be held on the university's campus.

The dedication on October 21, 1897, attended by 750 invited guests, was
covered by newspapers across the nation. Even the Times of London
felt compelled to comment, worrying that the new university had built a
telescope it could not afford to maintain. The dedication began with a procession
of the university faculty, visiting astronomers, and the trustees. Harper
and Yerkes entered together at the tail of the procession. The Chicago
Tribune carried excerpts from the speeches, later published in their
entirety in the Astrophysical Journal.

Yerkes formally presented the observatory to the university: "The
science of astronomy, while being the oldest extant, has been, we may say,
the most neglected. It is in no way commercial, and that may be one of the
chief reasons." And, he went on, "The devotee of astronomy has
as his only reward the satisfaction which comes to him in the glory of the
work which he does, and the results which he accomplishes." At last,
Yerkes had acknowledged what Hale had been trying to make him understand
for five years. Martin A. Ryerson, the president of the Board of Trustees,
accepted the gift of the observatory for the university, noting, "I
am convinced that we are here at the inception of a great work which will
justify itself by the practical value of its results as well as the ideal
nature of its aims." Finally, Harper addressed the crowd: "In
every department of science there is opportunity today for the development
of what might be called the sensational . . . . The work of not a few observatories
and of not a few astronomers has been seriously injured by the desire to
do and say that which will attract public attention. The Yerkes Observatory
will strenuously oppose every tendency of their character." With that
mandate, the Yerkes Observatory undertook its work, with George Ellery Hale
at the helm.

Hale did not remain in Williams Bay long--bigger and better telescopes
beckoned. Even before the dedication, he persuaded his father to fund the
mirror for a sixty-inch reflecting telescope. (Building a refracting telescope
larger than the forty-inch instrument housed in the Yerkes Observatory was
not possible because the weight of the glass would deform the lens.) A reflecting
telescope is less precise, but it collects more light and can be larger.
He wrote to Harper that such a telescope would permit examination of stars
"on so large a scale as to permit the study of their chemical composition,
the temperature and pressure in their atmospheres, and their motions with
[a] high degree of precision." The University of Chicago was not ready
for another project of this scale. Hale remained at the Yerkes Observatory
long enough to host the first meeting of the American Astronomical and Astrophysical
Society in 1899. By 1904 he was in California, where he arranged funding
for the sixty-inch telescope, which was built on Mount Wilson; it was the
largest reflecting telescope in the world. Shortly thereafter he added a
one-hundred-inch reflector in Pasadena. Together these instruments were
renamed the Hale Observatories after his death in 1938. With the one-hundred-inch
telescope, Edwin Hubble would settle the debate in 1923 regarding the existence
of other galaxies.

The Yerkes telescope focused the eyes of the astronomy community on the
United States for the first time. Hale departed, but E.E. Barnard remained
and completed a photographic survey of the entire Milky Way galaxy, a survey
that is still of use today. The smaller refractors have been replaced by
two Cassegrain-mounted reflectors (a Cassegrain-mounted telescope has its
eyepiece at the base; a Newtonian-mounted telescope has its eyepiece on
its side). The forty-inch telescope is still the largest refractor in the
world, and the Yerkes Observatory is still the primary observatory of the
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.